Life Actually: Trust yourself and your intuition

Of the many lessons I try to teach my children, one of the most essential lessons is to trust their gut instincts and funny feelings.

Particularly when it comes to people, I encourage them to pay attention to red flags. If someone gives them a bad vibe or a sneaking suspicion, there is typically a reason. If a situation doesn’t seem right or feel right — well, it probably isn’t right.

Sometimes we learn this lesson the hard way, don’t we? Sometimes we have to ignore our gut instincts and get burned as a result to understand why bad vibes, hunches and feelings of unease are worth paying attention to. Most of the time, they are God’s way of protecting us from a potentially harmful situation.

I have a friend who once dated a guy she thought was her perfect match. They fell in love and even talked about marriage. After nine months, however, their relationship blew up when she realized he’d lied about everything.

He wasn’t a graduate teaching assistant working on his master’s degree in English — he was a college dropout who had gone back to school to earn his undergraduate degree. All his talk about office hours, the books he’d written and going out with his students after class was totally bogus.

His biggest lie was the fellowship he said he had been awarded to an elite northern college. He had almost convinced my friend, about to finish law school, to move with him.

But here is what happened: my friend’s mother busted him. Her mom suspected something wasn’t right, and when she saw her daughter stop to admire engagement rings in a jewelry store window one day while they shopped, she decided to investigate.

Her mom happened to be friends with the dean of the English department, and using her motherly ways, she arranged an impromptu introduction between her daughter’s boyfriend and the dean one night at a party. What started as a friendly exchange turned awkward when the dean didn’t know this “teaching assistant” on her staff. As he stumbled to answer questions about other faculty members, the tension escalated. From this point on his lies unraveled — and their relationship fell apart.

Looking back, my friend can see clearly the red flags of their romance. She can pinpoint many moments that made her think, “Wait a minute, that’s a little odd.”

But as most of us have done at some point, especially in matters of love, she dismissed her intuition. She bought into her boyfriend’s lofty promises because the dream world he created was hard to resist.

Nobody is perfect — we all know that — and sometimes people deserve a second chance to redeem themselves in a relationship.

At the same time, we have to be smart. We need to recognize the difference between a mistake and a major character flaw. While a mistake may be a one-time incident, a major character flaw creates a pattern of poor behavior. Little issues become big issues as poor choices add up.

It’s easy to overlook a character flaw when someone is charming, beautiful or good at making us feel good. In any relationship, however, we’d be wise to keep our eyes open and know what we’re getting into. While some flaws and issues are bearable, a flaw like deceit is an entirely different ballgame.

As our kids grow up, they will realize quickly how some people aren’t good for them. I pray they pay attention to the signs and the smoke rings they see. I hope they trust their intuition and look at a person’s track record to decide who to invite into their life.

It’s easiest to cut off an unhealthy relationship early, before we’re deeply invested and while the red flags are obvious. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and rather than kick ourselves for trusting the wrong person, we can chalk it up to experience. Sometimes it takes traveling down a dead-end road to know which roads to avoid. It may take ignoring our moral radar to understand why the radar exists in the first place.

Relationships are tricky, but thankfully, we have a God who speaks to us through quiet intuition and the people who love us most. The more we tune into our internal gauges, the stronger they become. With time and practice we can learn to choose healthy relationships, relationships that launch us in a positive direction and help us steer clear of trouble.

Kari Kubiszyn Kampakis is a Mountain Brook mom of four girls, columnist and blogger for The Huffington Post. Her two books for teen and tween girls — “Liked: Whose Approval Are You Living For?” and “10 Ultimate Truths Girls Should Know” — are available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. Join her Facebook community at “Kari Kampakis, Writer,” visit her blog at karikampakis.com or contact her at kari@karikampakis.com.